Seth Lipsky

Seth Lipsky

Politics

Battle of Jerusalem: What Congress should do now

Let the massacre of the rabbis in Israel serve as a wake-up call to the new Congress that will be seated in Washington come January. May the solons assert their powers as our enemies gird for the next engagement in the Battle of Jerusalem.

I’ve been using the phrase Battle of Jerusalem for two decades. It connotes the full fight — military, diplomatic and political — as Israel’s adversaries try to wrest Judaism’s holiest city from the Jewish state.

The fact that three of the four rabbis hatcheted to death in the latest attack were Americans underscores the fact that Congress has a stake in this battle. Yet for decades it has shrunk from asserting its full powers.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan made that point to me in the 1990s, when the senator visited the Forward, which I was editing. He was frustrated at the State Department’s pussy-footing on Jerusalem.

Moynihan was wise. He started off by reminding us that Menachem Begin used to say that the status of Jerusalem can’t be decided in the US Congress. It has to be determined, and can only be won, by Israel.

That doesn’t mean, Moynihan argued, that there’s nothing Congress can do to help. Its representative nature has made it by far the most pro-Israel branch of the government.

Yet every time Congress steps up on Jerusalem, it fails to follow through.

This happened when it sought to force President Bill Clinton to move America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

As it readied a law, then-Rep. Charles Schumer assured New Yorkers that the deed would be done by year’s end. At the last moment, however, Congress flinched.

It slipped into the law a waiver allowing the president to delay the move by six months if he reckoned it would hurt our national security. That was 1995, and the US embassy is still in Tel Aviv.

What a mockery of Congress — and not the only one. In 2002, Congress passed a law requiring the State Department to issue to an American child born in Jerusalem a passport saying he was born in Israel.

The bill passed almost unanimously. Yet when the American parents of such an American asked for such a passport, the State Department — under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — refused.

The lad has been to the Supreme Court twice and is awaiting a decision. Members of Congress, incidentally, had to hire their own lawyer to defend the legislature’s constitutional powers.

Let Congress not wait for the outcome of that case to up its game on Jerusalem. It cheered Prime Minister Netanyahu — twice, once in 1996 and once in 2011 — when he vowed that Jerusalem would never be divided.

This is a fight Congress can take repeatedly to the State Department and to the United Nations, not to mention any other multilateral institutions that have anything to do with the Middle East.

Congress can encourage Israel’s expansion of housing in areas that will remain part of the Jewish state in any conceivable peace deal.

It can pressure Jordan, which has control of the Temple Mount, and seek to force an end to the pact under which Jews walking near their holiest site are banned from praying, even by moving their lips in silent prayer.

It can halt funding for America’s separate consular mission in Jerusalem.

That mission, a hotbed of anti-Israel activity, perpetuates Palestinian Arab hopes to repartition the city.

The Republican Senate could also use the confirmation process for ambassadors to discover whether they are committed to American law. That law declares United States policy to be that Jerusalem should be recognized as the undivided capital of Israel.

This is where the results of the election come in. With Democrats controlling the Senate, Robert Menendez of New Jersey has been a fine chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. But his party — and our president — have been weak.

Delegates to the 2012 Democratic Convention actually booed the motion to restore the Jerusalem plank to the party’s platform — indeed, voted down the measure only to be ignored by the convention chair.

The Republican Senate has an opportunity to take the lead in this fight.

When a Jewish person is martyred, as the rabbis were this week, an honorific is placed after his name — Hy”d, for Hashem yinkom damo. It is a prayer for God’s vengeance.

But honorable men and women can act as well as pray, and much can be done for the cause of peace as well as justice through a strong stand by the mortals in Congress.